6 Charts That Show Business Travelers Prefer Uber During Trips

Dan Peltier, Skift

- Oct 20, 2015 6:30 am

Skift Take

Rental cars have felt some of the burn during Uber’s rise but this data show they still have a foot in the game if they can create smarter marketing tactics and make doing business with them simpler for business travelers.

— Dan Peltier

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Ride-sharing apps are no longer technologies used for getting home from a bar or friend’s party as business travelers demonstrate these are preferred transportation modes during trips.

Evidenced in a third quarter expense report from Certify, a cloud-based travel and expense management software company, ride-share expenses grew 100% year-over-year and taxi expenses have decreased more than rental car expenses. The U.S. cities seeing the most ride-sharing growth include those with both robust and weak public transportation infrastructures. Boston and New York, for example, both offer ample public transportation options yet are still among the top five U.S. cities with the most ride-share growth. Ride-sharing actually eclipsed rental cars in Boston for the first time during the third quarter.

Certify’s data is based on 8.5 million receipts and expenses from Q3 2015 and show that taxis have seen more of an impact than rental cars from business travelers’ expensing of ride-share companies like Uber.

Chart 1: During the past seven quarters ride-sharing has steadily increased as a percent of overall ground transportation while taxi and rental car expenses have declined. Ride-share expenses grew 100% from Q3 2014 to Q3 2015, and while both taxi and rental car expenses decreased from last year, taxi expenses decreased more (-29%) while rental cars decreased 15%.

Chart 2: Boston saw the most growth of any U.S. city for ride-sharing expenses from Q2-Q3 2015.

Chart 3: Boston’s ride-sharing growth during the past quarter was enough to eclipse rental car expenses for the first time.

Chart 4: Boston comes in as the U.S. city with the second most ride-share expenses, only behind San Francisco which had ride-shares account for 88% of all rides compared to taxis in Q3 2015.

Chart 5: When looking at all expense reports for the third quarter, Uber was about 20% cheaper than taxis and Lyft about 30% cheaper than taxis.

Chart 6: Uber isn’t the only ride-share company that can claim success–Lyft is also making significant strides.

Source: Certify

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